Council of the Gods

The gods of Olympus have gathered on a bank of cloud, and the mood is sociable, with figures lounging, talking and leaning on one another above a soft, hilly landscape. The Mauritshuis points out where the goddesses came from. Poelenburgh modelled their pale bodies on the Roman marble statues he had studied in Italy, so the nudes resting on these clouds began as antiquities he had drawn in Rome. He painted the scene around 1630, back home in Utrecht, on a copper plate of 38 by 49 centimetres.

Small, polished mythologies like this were bought by the grandest collectors of the day, and this one kept that company for a long time. In the 1770s it belonged in Paris to Louis François de Bourbon, Prince de Conti, a cousin of the French king, and by 1793 to the Duke de Praslin. It reached the Mauritshuis in 1983 as a gift from the Maastricht art dealer Robert Noortman.